More likely, Anson had brought it with him and had assaulted them with it. A jolt from a Taser can disable a man for minutes, leave him helpless, muscles spasming as his nerves misfire.
Although Mitch knew where he must go, he delayed the terrible moment and went instead to the master bedroom.
The lights were on except for a nightstand lamp that had been knocked to the floor in a struggle, the bulb broken. The sheets were tangled. Pillows had slid off the bed.
The sleepers had been literally shocked awake.
Daniel owned a large collection of neckties, and perhaps a score were scattered across the carpet. Bright serpents of silk.
Glancing through other doors but not taking the time to inspect fully the spaces beyond, Mitch moved more purposefully to the room at the end of the shorter of the two upstairs halls.
Here the door was like all the others, but when he opened it, another door faced him. This one was heavily padded and covered with a black fabric.
Shaking badly, he hesitated. He had expected never to return here, never to cross this threshold again.
The inner door could be opened only from the hall, not from the chamber beyond. He turned the latch release. The well-fitted channels of an interlocking rubber seal parted with a sucking sound as he pushed the door inward.
Inside, there were no lamps, no ceiling fixture. He switched on the flashlight.
After Daniel himself had layered floor, walls, and ceiling with eighteen inches of various soundproofing materials, the room had been reduced to a windowless nine-foot square. The ceiling was six feet.
The black material that upholstered every surface, densely woven and without sheen, soaked up the beam of the flashlight.
Modified sensory deprivation. They had said it was a tool for discipline, not a punishment, a method to focus the mind inward toward self-discovery — a technique, not a torture. Numerous studies had been published about the wonders of one degree or another of sensory deprivation.
Daniel and Kathy lay side by side: she in her pajamas, he in his underwear. Their hands and ankles had been bound with neckties. The knots were cruelly tight, biting the flesh.
The bindings between the wrists and those between the ankles had been connected with another necktie, drawn taut, to further limit each victim's movement.
They had not been gagged. Perhaps Anson had wanted to have a conversation with them.
And screams could not escape the learning room.
Although Mitch stooped just inside the door, the aggressive silence pulled at him, as quicksand pulls what it snares, as gravity the falling object. His rapid, ragged breathing was muffled to a whispery wheeze.
He could not hear the windstorm anymore, but he was sure that the wind abided.
Looking at Kathy was harder than looking at Daniel, though not as difficult as Mitch had expected. If he could have prevented this, he would have stood between them and his brother. But now that it was done…it was done. And the heart sank rather than recoiled, and the mind fell into despondency but not into despair.
Daniel's face, eyes open, was wrenched by terror, but there was clearly puzzlement in it as well. At the penultimate moment, he must have wondered how this could be — how Anson, his one success, could be the death of him.
Systems of child-rearing and education were numberless, and no one ever died because of them, or at least not the men and women who dedicated themselves to conceiving and refining the theories.
Tasered, tied, and perhaps following a conversation, Daniel and Kathy had been stabbed. Mitch did not dwell upon the wounds.
The weapons were a pair of gardening shears and a hand trowel.
Mitch recognized them as having come from the rack of tools in his garage.
Chapter 38
Mitch closed the bodies in the learning room, and he sat at the top of the stairs to think. Fear and shock and one Red Bull weren't sufficient to clear his thoughts as fully as four hours of sleep would have done.
Battalions of wind threw themselves against the house, and the walls shuddered but withstood the siege.
Mitch could have wept if he had dared to allow himself tears, but he would not have known for whom he was crying.
He had never seen Daniel or Kathy cry. They believed in applied reason and "mutual supportive analysis" in place of easy emotion.
How could you cry for those who never cried for themselves, who talked and talked themselves through their disappointments, their misadventures, and even their bereavements?
No one who knew the truth of this family would fault him if he cried for himself, but he had not cried for himself since he was five because he had not wanted them to have the satisfaction of his tears.
He would not cry for his brother.
The wretched kind of pity that he had felt for Anson earlier was vapor now. It had not boiled away here in the learning room, but in the trunk of the vintage Chrysler.
During his drive north from Rancho Santa Fe, with four windows open to ventilate the car, he let the draft blow from him all delusion and self-deception. The brother whom he had thought he knew, had thought he loved, in fact had never existed. Mitch had loved not a real person but instead a sociopath's performance, a phantom.
Now Anson had seized the moment to take vengeance on Daniel and Kathy, pinning the crimes on his brother, whom he thought would never be found.
If Holly was not ransomed, her kidnappers would kill her and perhaps dispose of her body at sea. Mitch would take the fall for her murder — and, somehow, for the shooting of Jason Osteen.
Such a killing spree would thrill the cable-channel true-crime shows. If he was missing — in fact dead in a desert grave — the search for him would be their leading story for weeks if not for months.
In time he might become a legend like D. B. Cooper, the airline hijacker who, decades earlier, had parachuted out of a plane with a fortune in cash, never to be heard from again.
Mitch considered returning to the learning room to collect the gardening shears and the hand trowel. The thought of wrenching the blades from the bodies repulsed him. He had done worse in recent hours; but he could not do this.
Besides, clever Anson had probably salted other evidence in addition to the gardening tools. Finding it would take time, and Mitch had no time to spare.
His wristwatch read six minutes past three in the morning. In less than nine hours, the kidnappers would call Anson with further instructions.
Forty-five of the original sixty hours remained until the midnight-Wednesday deadline.
This would be over long before then. New developments required new rules, and Mitch was going to set them.
With an imitation of wolves, the wind called him into the night.
After turning off the upstairs lights, he went down to the kitchen. In the past, Daniel had always kept a box of Hershey's bars in the refrigerator. Daniel liked his chocolate cold.
The box waited on the bottom shelf, only one bar missing. These had always been Daniel's treats, off limits to everyone else.
Mitch took the entire box. He was too exhausted and too tightly knotted with anxiety to be hungry, but he hoped that sugar might substitute for sleep.
He turned out the first-floor lights and left the house by the front door.
Brooms of fallen palm fronds swept the street, and in their wake came a rolling trash can spewing its contents. Impatiens withered and shredded themselves, shrubs shook as if trying to pull themselves up by their roots, a ripped window awning — actually green, but black in this light — flapped madly like the flag of some demonic nation, the eucalyptuses gave the wind a thousand hissing voices, and it seemed as if the moon would be blown down and the stars snuffed out like candles.